However, have you ever thought about yoga helping you to speed up your metabolism and increasing your metabolic rate? Your metabolism is like your nice and cozy fireplace that converts or “burns” the food you’re eating into energy and something valuable for your body and overall well-being. Do you know those fit and healthy people that eat quite a lot when you go out to eat or see them at a party? And you might think “Wow, how can they eat all that without gaining weight?”

Well, there is actually no secret to it. People who exercise regularly built up muscle, and the more muscles we have, the more calories we burn. Furthermore, when we burn more calories, we increase our resting metabolic rate (RMR) in order to burn them.

However, our muscle mass is not the only factor that increases our metabolism, there are also:

Gender, Age

Physical Activity

Nutrition

Crash-diets etc.

How does Yoga help with our metabolism?

Well, although yoga isn’t actually a workout, it does build our long and lean muscles and therefore is an effective way to get our fire on and burn more. Just holding each pose for up to a minute, really challenges our strength, balance, and concentration. The breathing is your most important tool in your yoga practice, and this fills your organs with enough oxygen and improves your circulatory system, which is another important factor for increasing your metabolism. Also the twists and turns in yoga are great digestion boosters and wonderful for detoxing our bodies!

Just recently, I encountered a wonderful article about>>>Yoga and Metabolism<<<that explains how yoga affects our metabolism in a more detailed way, including those two beautifully depictured yoga sequences (see below), as well as tips on how to stay in top yogi shape! A great read!